REST is a style of web application writing where, among other things, youuse simple structured URLs to represent resources instead of heavilyparameterized ones. For example, 'https://example.com/users/cks/' is aRESTful URL but 'https://example.com/users?name=cks' is not.

(RESTful URLs are virtuous for a number of reasons, including being lessalarming to search engines and being simpler, so it's easier for peopleto remember them

There's been a recent fad for DNS whitelists, the rough inverse of DNSblacklists; instead of listing claimed bad sources of email, they listclaimed good sources. I've been thinking about this for a while, and Ibelieve that such DNS whitelists are going to fail.

Why I believe DNS whitelists are doomed can be summed up in a simplequestion: do you whitelist Hotmail or not? If you whitelist Hotmail, youare whitelisting a known source of a not insignificant amount of spam.If you

pyOpenSSL is a high-level Pythonwrapper around a subset of the OpenSSL library (to quote it). It waspulled onto my machines recently as part of a Fedora update, and sinceI'm currently interested in OpenSSL-related things I decided to playaround with it to try it out.

After writing some basic stuff, I have to say that I like it. It's notentirely documented (and for some things you really want to read theOpenSSL manpages too), but it works fine

One of the eternal curses of student Unix labs is students casuallyturning off workstations the way they turn off other PCs when they'redone with them. (A problem made worse by vendors putting glowing powerbuttons on the front panel of machines, where they become an easytemptation.)

In theory the answer to this is Wake-on-LAN. You probably have at leastone inaccessible computer per lab, so run a daemon on that that noticeswhen workstations are down and sends out a WoL packet to get